Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

The gift of Grace: COBOL's odyssey from Vietnam to the Square Mile

Re: Real Programmers *and* Mythical Man Month?

/* comment in K&R :-) */

surely?

Re: Happy Birthday System/360 and COBOL ...

IIRC Cobol was intended to be read by the business managers so they could understand what these computer people were doing with their money.

That's why it has such verbose statements instead of math-geek freindly symbols.

Gay marriage foes outraged at Mozilla CEO flap, call for boycott

So ...

Are we now boycotting Firefox because they don't support FreeSpeech or OkCupid ?

Do I have to signup for OkCupid before I can boycott it?

Can i still boycott it if I have no idea what OkCupid does and had never heard of it before this?

VAT's all folks: Telecoms and services tax to be set at consumer's homeland rate

Re: Administration knightmare

You already have to do this with the physical goods you described.

Now you just have to do it with stuff you download - instead of pretending that all your business is in a lawyers office in Luxembourg

Internet is a tool of Satan that destroys belief, study claims

Re: So access to information

That's not fair - not all Opera users are like that !

Re: So access to information

It was teaching the peasants to read that began the decline - damn enlightenment.

In Australia, protesting against Brendan Eich will be a CRIME

Re: Boycott The Australian Government?

Or we send Boycott in to bat against the Australian government.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

Re: Why won't the mainframe die?

Put it this way - nobody is running around in a panic wondering how they are going to migrate 1000s of users off a mainframe platform they only installed 10 years ago.

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

Surely "there are no silver bullets" doesn't apply anymore now that we have the cloud and web and hadoop and node.js ?

Mad Raspberry Pi boffins ripped out its BRAINS and SHRANK them for your pleasure

Re: It's still too expensive

So a single one of these as the controller and a bunch of $5 arduinos managing each thermostat

India's GPS alternative launches second satellite

Re: Wrong search term

AFAIK Baidu the chinese system now uses LEO and a cosntelation the same as GPS/Galileo/etc

Their original system used a single GSO space segment providing timing only along with a ground network of stations.

Advantage was that they only needed a single satelite but you needed to have a comms channel on the ground.

Real advantage was that nobody could use it without the ground stations also knowing who and where they where.

Interested in how the Indian system is going to work. Would the time difference between satellites in a line 40,000km away really give you a good position?

Re: What happened to

>There are pieces of it sitting about 50 metres from me

So a highly accurate if somewhat localised system?

Re: To those who bleat about cost - you might have misssed something . . .

It's still only 1/3 the cost of a single space shuttle launch to LEO

Tesla in 'Ethernet port carries data' SCANDAL

Re: I'd guess none

You still have to, according to the FSF (it hasn't been tested in court) offer to ship the customer the source for all the packages in the Ubuntu distribution you are using.

They claim that pointing to the ubuntu repo isn't enough, but worst case you would just have to mirror ir.

Why ever leave home? Amazon wants to turn your kitchen into a shop

Re: And people complain about the ...

That's the advantage of this system.

You could stay home and have a note pushed through the door saying "we tried to deliver but you were out...." then you can wait a couple of days and drive to a delivery centre on an industrial park 30mins away to collect you order. By which time your fish has definitely stopped moving.

Time is on their side: NIST's new atomic clock accurate for 300 million years

Re: Then we have leap seconds

Your GPS isn't confused by leap seconds because it doesn't use them.

Internally it uses GPS time (no leap seconds) your receiver adds the leap seconds when it display the time. The problem with leap seconds is that when somebody in Paris decides to add one, you cant guarantee that every satellite will get the message instantly.

The americans wanted to drop the whole silly idea - but the UK, among others, vetoed it.

Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer

Re: Confused

That's why the results of the study shouldn't be surprising. eg. Fair trade coffee is "a good thing" because it helps poor farmers, not because it keeps you awake better. Organic shouldn't be better as food.

What is surprising is that people who eat organic/home grown veg would be expected to be more health conscious, eat better diets, not smoke/drink, etc.

So either they did a really good job of correcting for this - ie found yoga+healthy eating+exercise nuts who nevertheless only ate supermarket veg.

Or the whole study was too small/short to show any effect.

Or those who claimed that they always ate organic were lying.

Final Windows XP Patch Tuesday will plug Word RTF vuln

While they were totally protected yesterday ?

If you are still getting exploits on an OS that has been out for 10years then you really can't rely on updates to protect you

Right, Turkey – elections are over. You can use Twitter again

Re: If Carrie Fisher were Turkish...

So just have the Turkish Daily Mail claim that twitter harms the little children and have it banned

'We’re not sneaky, we're dads from the Midwest'

Dropbox magic

>comparing file hashes. We don't look at the files in your private

So is this just NSA style legalese, they don't "look" at the files, they measure the magneto resistance of the bits on the disk.

Or do Dropbox have some non-contact way of calculating a filehash? Perhaps they calculate all possible file hashes and then use quantum mechanics to select the alternate universe in which they correct one is first?

Italy has a clumsy new pirate-choker law. But can anyone do better?

Re: It's about time

>even though it's illegal, then it should surely be legalised...

Which would mean the end of speed limits and drink driving laws - on the positive side you would be allowed to hunt Jeremy Clarkson with dogs.

Re: It's about time

> Facilitators get 10 years minimum prison and high fines.

Sounds good as long as it also applies to corporates.

A movie studio rips off a writer? All its employees and all the stars of its movies get 10years.

A new hit record is suspiciously similar to a 60s rif? Kylie et al all go to the big house.

I QUIT: Mozilla's anti-gay-marriage Brendan Eich leaps out of door

Re: Baker quits Mozilla as well

Aren't we all quitting Mozilla in favour of IE?

The more we support Windows the more money BGates has to donate to good causes

ICANN boss: 'Russia and China will NOT take over interwebs'

Re: Never Happen

It means a US govt taking away Iraq's .iq domain and giving control of it to a dodgy businessman in Texas.

'Hello, is that the space station? NASA here. Can you put us through to Moscow?'

Re: Quick get the oxycetelyne torches

Ariane5 is pretty close to man-rated due to the original frogs-in-space/hermes project.

Should be easy enough to put a capsule on that and then the Americans can ask the French 'pretty please can we get a lift' - that seems like a win all-round.

Re: Political Posturing

>So are ordinary people.

So we will keep buying $Bnin gas / coal / oil /metals from the Russian government

We will continue selling them football teams

But we will kick a couple of PostDoc researchers working on vaccines out to show our wrath.

David Cameron defends BT's taxpayer-funded broadband 'monopoly': It's a 'success story'

Re: This is a real success story for our country

That's the real genius of BT - only they have the infrastructure investment and technical knowledge to achieve ADSL speeds over fibre.

Dimwit hackers use security camera DVRs as SUPER-SLOW Bitcoin-mining rig

Re: Correction:

>Bitcoin mining on a GPU now would be a mug's game

Unless you aren't paying for the GPU or electricity.

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

Re: Mr. Trevor Pott's analysis is correct

And would they have been told that newer versions of Windows would stop netbui, or direct access to the parralel port, or support for x?

Re: XP will only be insecure if connected

>Procedure: Securely fasten CNC machine USB devices to 15 cm mild steel angle iron. Fixed.

Is WindowsXP compatible with 6in mild steel?

I know for Windows8 you need to use Titanium

Intel's DIY MinnowBoard goes Max: More oomph for half the price

Re: Why?

You want to be able to use any Linux distribution "off the shelf" without wondering if somebody has ported package X to ARM (most performance critical apps aren't just autoconf+make)

This also has twice the RAM, more CPU (for most tasks) and USB3

Doesn't mean it's better for everything, but "ARM good Intel bad" is just as silly as the other way around.

OkCupid falls out of love with 'anti-gay' Firefox, tells people to see other browsers

Re: Product != CEO @ NomNomNom

> Imagine if some CEO said it was their opinion that people of different races should not be allowed to marry. And paid towards a campaign to prevent it.

Eric Raymond is a vocal pro-gun supporter. Suppose after the next school shooting Microsoft ran something similar on their website saying if you used an opensource browser or OS you were in favour of killing children.

If the product is the CEO we should all give up linux to embrace Windows and enable BillG to fund more humanitarian causes

MPs attack BT's 'monopolistic' grip on gov-subsidised £1.2bn rural broadband rollout

Re: Incumbent get more cash from incumbent fund

Yes - there was a startup in cambridge doing to-the-house microwave links with tiny antennae

But it only made sense in volume and since BT was required to run a copper line for your fixed phone - whatever the cost - there was no market for a more expensive (to the home owner) link. Even though it would have actually cost less overall.

BT Tower to be replaced by 3D printed BT Tower

Re: Re too obvious

As a compromise the Scots will be allowed to keep the pound - so long as they never spend any.

Traditional Scots are said to be delighted with the idea

UK cops: Keep yer golden doubloons, ad folk. Yon websites belong to pirates

Re: Oh Yeah ?

What about all those advertisers who pay for ads on the sites and in print of tabloid newspapers?

If the advetisers don't read the Guardian/Private Eye they might not have heard of the illegal phone hacking activities by the newspapers. With this legislation the CoLP will be able to warn people not to advertise in the Sun.

Re: 'Evidenced and verified'

But the CoLP are in charge of policing the city. And we know what a great job they have done making sure that none of the financial institutions in their jurisdiction never do anything criminal.

Shouldn't they be allowed to spread their expertise further?

Snowden files latest: NSA and GCHQ targeted German satcomms

Re: encrypt everything?

It shows that conventional encryption works very well - otherwise they wouldn't have needed to hack/pwn and generally invade peoples computers.

US to strengthen privacy rights for Euro bods' personal data transfers

Re: Too little too late.

It's not about NSA/GCHQ spying on you - as soon as the data is in the UK you can be sure it's in Fort Meade.

It's about having your Doctors surgery using software from a US company to process your records and finding that the T&C allow the company to sell all your details to the US arm of your pension provider.

Microsoft: Let's be clear, WE won't read your email – but the cops will

An ex-Ford employee is believed to have leaked info - so Ford use a master to key to open all Fords in the UK and search through them for evidence ?

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Re: Head to head

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

Get malaria/bilharzia - a billion users can't be wrong.

Say WHAT? ATVOD claims 44k Brit primary school kids look at smut online each month

Re: Does not add up!

You would simply need to block all naughty sites coming into the country.

Some sort of great firewall, perhaps the Chinese could bid on it.

China's rare earth supply crimp plan ruled to be illegal

Re: If you join the club, you keep to the rules

So just claim that their are security reasons for restricting exports - just like we do with anything going to china. Then you can also restrict other people exporting their own rare earths as well.

Brit game devs WILL get tax relief for, er, EastEnders Game and Legend of Slough

Elite?

The original British computer game success and what sums up British culture more than "elite"?

Alternatively - rewrite "frogger" with badgers where the aim is to get squashed

Facebook Oculus VR buyout: IT WANTS your EYEBALLS

Re: wow

>Did you get the listed reward for being a backer? Yes? Then you you got what you paid for,

Or, I paid for a dev kit for a new VR eco-system which I now find is owned by Facebook.

It's like buying an ARM dev kit, funding the development of ARM, and then being told that all ARM devices were now sold to company X and only company X's software would run on them.

ISPs CAN be ordered to police pirates by blocking sites, says ECJ

Re: Next up.....

>this is like informing a courier that they may no longer deliver parcels from a particular company because they are known to distribute pirated materials.

If they only deliver pirate materials or have occasionally delivered pirate materials?

The BBC have illegally used stock photos without accreditation and stripped the meta info - should BBC.co.uk be banned by all ISP's in Britain?

Microsoft, Sony, Apple etc have been caught using FOSS code in some products without proper distribution - do they all get banned?

Putin and pals dump Apple's iPads for Samsung slabs... over security concerns

Re: At least one US President

Quite sweet really that any body in the US military-industrial complex thinks Carter is a threat to the status quo.

Rather like finding that MI5 is spying on Tony Blair in case he is a a KGB agent

Passport PIN tech could have SAVED MH370 ID fraudsters

Re: Why mess around?

Totally unecessary - in fact there is no need for a passport at all.

If you are British, by God, the only reason to leave the country is the occasional need to teach johnny foreigner a lesson - and invasions normally entail a minimum of customs formalities.

If you are a foreigner you should jolly well stay there.

Re: Is there electricity and a network connection at your border entry points?

This is a brilliant idea.

In order to make this work every country is going to have to agree on a single standard and share their databases. The USA, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, Britain and France - all working together in a spirit of cooperation and international brotherhood